used speaker wire is it a bad idea?

You cannot buy used speaker cables, the electrons inside are all wonky...

Yes. A couple of years back my Hi Fi club was offered an opportunity to come to Manhattan and clean out two store rooms belonging to a well-known audio magazine, who were moving.

As part of the booty we found 100's of feet of speaker cable, some commodity, some high end. It appears that they used 12 gauge to hook up systems for demos and reviews, based on the left-overs.

Sigh. Irony is dead.
There is no such thing as high-end wire.

Monoprice 12ga . Looks great, sounds the same as lamp cord. But it was cheap, and it looks good.

Kraut was making a little joke.

Its a techie joke! It can't happen because every speaker wire is used speaker wire after the first time you use it!

99+ percent of all situations are brilliantly and stupendously well-handled by commodity cable. Thing is that half price high end speaker wire is usually still costing many times what it is actually worth.

Dealers love high end speaker wire even if they sell audio gear by the bucket because they often make more money on the wires then they do on the main components.

My speaker wires are a composite. 12 gauge jumpers from the AVR to the wall plate which has Speakon connectors. The wires at the AVR end are bare twisted and firmly clamped by the 5-way binding posts on the AVR. 12 gauge stranded house wire twisted pair inside the wall up to the general location of the speakers. Another Speakon connector connects a 12 gauge jumper from the wall to the speaker. The wires at the speaker end are bare twisted and firmly clamped by the 5-way binding posts on the speakers. I'm of the opinion that if you can push the bare wire through the hole at the bottom of the binding post and clamp it tightly, that is about as good as it gets.

There are enough wires and connectors installed to support 4 speakers at that end of the room. Obviously, there will never be more than 3 but the wall plates and connectors came in pairs.

Wire is cheap but installing it is expensive and nasty. So tank up when you are punching holes in the wall and pulling cables!

It died with science in education.

Oh, now you are baiting...

I think you're naive.

You've posted 1116 times and now you're compelled to ask a versus question about speaker wire?

Come on man!

First of all, I apologize for the name calling.

I compared MIT Shotgun speaker cable to 12 gauge a few years ago. When level matched they "sounded" identical to my ear.

Why apologize?
But I have to wonder - with over 1100 posts you must have read a lot on this site especially regarding cables.
Now, if that is correct - did you not get the impression that the evidence for cables having any influence on the sound of audio reproduction is sorely lacking? That the evidence points all in the direction of inaudibility of minor measurable differences in cable? That so called "boutique" cables have one purpose only: to bolster the bank account of the manufacturer without providing anything but maybe aesthetics and bragging rights to the owner of such stuff?

I have similar questions in my mind.

If it makes you feel better; Unless the wire was subjected to consistant DC offsets, the electrons are probably the same ones that were there when the wire was made. AC power isn't transmitted by moving electrons, well, not electrons moving down the wire anyway.